Computer network communication has grown in recent years. For example, the number of Internet users in 1995 was twenty-four million, and the growth rate is about ten to fifteen percent each month. This growth has been fueled, in part, by the ease of accessing the World Wide Web (WWW), a portion of the Internet that allows users all over the world to obtain a variety of information from Web sites. Such rapid growth, combined with the decentralized nature of the Internet, has lead to congestion on the Internet. This congestion has been called "cybercrawl," and it has led to a desire for solutions that are more cost effective than simply adding network infrastructure. Some new alternative network providers are looking at reliable multicast transmission to be a key technology that can be used to minimize network traffic while at the same time distributing replicated web servers to the edges of the network for improved response times for the user. This minimizes backbone traffic by keeping traffic as localized as possible, while also improving response to the user by distributing server resource and keeping the queries and responses from user to server on a minimal transmission path. Virtually all networks desirous of this new method to gain efficiency have multiple content sources that they wish to replicate to the edges of the network. A major problem is one of coordination. How can the content be distributed by many content providers so that the distributions do not overwhelm network bandwidth, and how can multicast addresses be allocated without conflict among the various content sources?